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Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Liberal Pundit Upset Over Losing Her Non-Lousy Insurance Plan...and then some

But first, more confirmation of what we linked to (four times) last week:

"Affordable health care means trying to get more people insurance. ... Making people who had insurance buy a different product that costs more for less coverage? You can't ... defend that." ~ Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. (from that same article)

"...the "Cadillac tax" is 'bringing more immediacy' to the issue, prompting employers to scale back plans they wouldn't otherwise, 'with the 2018 deadline looming.'

"'The clear expectation was and is that the "Cadillac tax" -- the tax on high-cost health plans -- will cause those [employers offering] highly generous plans to pare back benefits somewhat so that they won't be subject to the tax,' Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained to CBSNews.com.

"In 2018, the rule will impose a 40 percent excise tax on employee benefits exceeding $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families. In 2013, the average employer-sponsored for individuals cost $5,884 and the average family plan cost $16,351."

"And all this is true. But it is not sabotage. This is opposition.

The Republicans thought the ACA a bad piece of work, a bad bill that would make things worse, not better.
...
"The new president—and this was a key historic moment—decided not to act on the accumulated presidential wisdom of the ages, which is: Get the other party in on all big things. Give them a stake in it, use them for cover, show you have bipartisan juice, that you are truly national and not only the leader of one party, show you can wield your mighty power across the aisles. Get them bragging they passed it, with your leadership. Make them co-own it so that when certain parts don’t work, and certain parts won’t, they have deep motives to help you fix it.

"Instead, a perfect storm of misjudgment, immaturity and lack of historical perspective, and a perfect storm of shortsighted selfishness (it’s all ours, it’s not even a little bit yours) brought forth a perfect storm of a health-care disaster.

"Cancelled plans generally can't be reinstated. Tweaking the law’s grandfathering rules won’t work, because of the start dates of many of the plans and because insurers, who have spent months if not years preparing their systems for the changeover, can’t rapidly reorganize their computer systems to accommodate a sudden change in policy. Expanding subsidies to individuals above 400 percent of the poverty line in order to mitigate the cost of buying a new plan wouldn’t be legal, and also wouldn’t help much if the online enrollment systems are still malfunctioning."

"Can this possibly be legal? Can the administration seriously be considering this idea, which is potentially costly and politically disastrous? Imagine how Democrats will feel about turning over the central operations of the health law to insurers. Imagine how Republicans will react to a plan that could cost more, and will serve as an implicit admission that the exchanges simply won’t work without a major overhaul."

F.Y.I: MORE FAILURES from the OBAMA PRESIDENCY (and I'm not even listing the "Shovel-Readies-That-Weren't"):

"The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE [Quantitative Easing] taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history...after a 14% drop in the U.S. stock market and renewed weakening in the banking sector—the Fed announced a new round of bond buying: QE2. Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, immediately called the decision 'clueless.' That was when I realized the Fed had lost any remaining ability to think independently from Wall Street. Demoralized, I returned to the private sector...I can only say: I'm sorry, America."

Of course the mere mention of ‘economic recovery’ perhaps does the most to explain why we never experienced a real one under Bernanke, and why we won’t enjoy one under Yellen insofar as Yellen’s meddling hand resembles Bernanke’s. We won’t because lost on both is the essential truth that the recession IS the recovery, it is the fix, it is the happy reversal of that which made us ill initially, including excessive consumption of housing. Recession is the market’s way of correcting the mistakes, the misallocations of capital, the labor market mismatches, and in a more literal sense, it’s the market’s way of releasing the human, physical and financial assets of Webvan and theglobe.com to nascent concepts that the markets actually want like Google and Facebook.

In light of the above, it’s long fascinated this writer that so many who are so smart, and who should know better, ascribe ‘brainy’ to people like Bernanke. Really? If Bernanke were brainy he would understand that his unwillingness to cease ‘supporting’ the economy is the Green Monster of a barrier to the economic recovery we all crave. Yellen represents more of the same. Like Bernanke, her hunger for adulation will cause her to continue ‘helping’ the economy stay afloat, and in doing so, she’ll cruelly rob us of the recovery we so desperately desire.

When Obama was elected in November 2008 and then took office in January 2009, the rates of unemployment and "broader unemployment" (see Politifact.com's site for explanation) were 5%/9.2% and 7.8%/14.2%, respectively. By 2012, both rates were still between 4 and 5 percent HIGHER than when he took office: to 8.2% and 14.8%. The "disposable personal income per capita" (after taxes, social security and medicare deductions, per person) when Obama took office was $32,166 per year. Three years later, in 2012, it had grown by just one-and-a-half-percent, only a measly $501, and was flat for the last two years, at $32,677. Meanwhile, the poverty rate increased a whopping fourteen percent from 13.2% in 2009 to 15.1% in 2011. Government spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) skyrocketed 21 percent, from 19% to almost 23%.

Don't think those debt increases are so spectacular? When was the last time you got three, annual 7% raises in a row totalling 21% of your salary or hourly rate of pay? I'm betting a thousand dollars on NEVER.

The federal government "recovered" nicely. The rest of us? Not so much.

Politifact.com also noted that in 2009, when Obama took office, the total federal publicly-held debt he inherited was $6.37 Trillion. By the 5th month of 2012, Obama had almost doubled our nation's debt to just about $11 Trillion. Think of it as the credit card you can never get out from under because you keep maxing it out and getting ever-higher credit limits to spend beyond your means.

Why is that not good? The GDP is the value of all goods and services we workers in this U.S. economy produce in a year. In personal terms, it's not exactly like this, but to make a loose comparison of the seriousness of the problem: if you brought home $100,000 in salary, that's the value of your services to your employer. If you rack up debt higher than $100,000, sure, you could keep paying interest on that debt, maybe $20,000 a year if you're lucky, but you'll always be in the hole, owned by that debt, beholden to the credit holders. You'll never advance. You'll never truly thrive.

From USA Today, January 2012:

President Obama's 2012 budget shows the debt soaring past $26 trillion a decade from now. Last summer's deficit reduction deal could reduce that to $24 trillion...Among advanced economies, only Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan and Portugal have debts larger than their economies. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Italy are at the root of the European debt crisis. The first three needed bailouts from European central banks; Italy's books are monitored by the International Monetary Fund.

By the time he's out of office, Obama will have more than TRIPLED our national debt. AND HE WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR QUADRUPLING OUR DEBT BY 2022. That's a 300% increase. Three. Hundred. Percent. Increase.

TIME: "If the Fed decides tomorrow to begin to wind down this program, wouldn’t the effect be higher interest rates and lower asset values? How will this help the economy?"Huszar: "I agree with you. We could have some pain associated with Fed tapering. But each day that QE continues, that potential pain increases because we’re distorting markets even more. We need to get to a point where we can get the size and the role of the Fed and the size and role of Wall Street back to where they belong. We have a structurally unsound economy where the conditions for growth are diminishing. If you look at global competitiveness of the U.S. economy, five years ago we were first in the world, today we’re seventh. If you look at our education system, forty years ago we were first in the world in college graduation rates, and today we’re fourteenth. You have a real decay in the conditions for growth in this country. There’s a question as to how much the government should be trying to stimulate economic activity and how much the government should be laying the groundwork for that activity to happen on its own. I worked in the government for nine years, and I believe it has an important role to play, but I also believe that the overall perspective is now entirely off."

"After Abortion,...run by Emily Peterson and Annie Banno, two women who had abortions in the 1970s, ...tries to avoid the political tug-of-war that tends to come with this turf. They concentrate instead on discussing the troubling personal effects of abortion on the mothers." ~ Eric Scheske, Godspy contributing editor, in NC Register's "Signs of Life in the Blogosphere", 2/2006

"I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion...[many are] aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and [do] not doubt that it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace...You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child..."

Tongue-In-Cheek

Misc.

Syndicates

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